I have Illustrator both at home and at work. At home, the folders c:\program\adobe\illustrator and c:\documents and settings\all users\application data\adobe… contains roughly 1.5 GB of files. I wouldn’t want to run it on a computer with less than 1GB ram.
We talked at work about how bloated the software became between CS2 and CS3. Yes, it was a major redesign of the interface and some nifty added functionality, but it also takes up more than double the HD space.
So coworker picks up a USB stick (4GB) and pops it into his laptop. All the major Adobe apps are on that stick: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver… And he can run it from the stick on a PC. Long version short: This is not an official Adobe light version, but some hacker has stripped all the software down to manageable size, removed the necessity to install. It can be run standalone (much as I understand software does on Macs), there’s nothing involving the registry, just an .exe file and a folder named “program data”.
So yes, copyright infringement, hacking and modding the software. But it’s still a fully functional, working copy of Illustrator, taking up about 500 MB of space on the memory stick. What the hell is that other 1 GB of code that Adobe has added? Why do software makers insist of involving the registry, when clearly it isn’t needed*? Really, what’s going on here? I’d gladly pay to upgrade (downgrade?) the normal fee to Adobe to get a legal copy of what coworker has.
*I checked. The registry on my computer has about 30 000 entries for Adobe.
When it comes to executable code, one GB is an astronomical amount. It’s extremely unlikely that there is an additional gig of executable there. More likely, the bulk of that data is taken up by all the zillions of little things that get distributed along with Adobe apps: fonts, icons, backgrounds, textures, filters, templates, samples, etc. IOW, one GB of useless data.
Well, of course, it isn’t illustrator.exe (1.5GB) vs. illustrator.exe (524 MB). But all the fonts are there (or in c:\windows\fonts, actually) and all filters, effects ASF. Some stuffe is missing (Adobe Cue, Bridge) but those are separate entities anyway. As far as I can tell, what I get on the screen is the same thing.
Its expensive but www.xenocode.com has a nifty app that will create a standalone exe out of damn near any app. I played with a demo and found it most impressive. You have to do it with a fresh install of the app after the virtualization program is loaded but its slick when you use it that way.
Oh, and the registry is needed, thats part of how windows knows what to do with an illustrator file is to look up the file type in the registry.